Jeff Childers

Trump is holding massive leverage. Global markets are getting beaten worse than a micro wrestler in a bar fight. Mainland China’s CSI 300 index dropped sharply into a plunge of around -6% to -7%. Hong Kong’s main stock measure, the Hang Seng Index, crashed -13%— its worst day since a 1997 landslide during the Asian financial crisis. Indexes in Shanghai, Taipei and Tokyo fell between -7% and -10%. European markets have free-fallen between -5% and -7% since their openings early this morning.

In an interview on NBC’s Meet the Depressed (LOL ), Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said, “I can tell you that, as only he can do at this moment, President Trump has created maximum leverage for himself. And more than 50 countries have approached the administration about lowering their non-tariff trade barriers, lowering their tariffs, and stopping currency manipulation.

Europe is on particularly shaky ground. EU Ministers will hold yet another emergency meeting today in Luxembourg to discuss how to collectively respond to U.S. tariffs. Meanwhile, Trump is dickering separately with many individual EU leaders.

Some commenters already speculate that Trump’s tariffs could shatter the European Union.

The European Union is a patchwork of competing national interests duct-taped together by bureaucracy and inertia. Trump is exploiting a structural weakness: the EU speaks with one voice— unless a member state sees a better deal. And the President can offer them better individual deals. You might call it a “tariff scalpel” strategy— slicing not just into trade surpluses, but also slicing apart alliances.

Only a couple weeks ago, the Europeans held frantic emergency meetings to discuss how to undermine America’s peace negotiations with Ukraine and Russia. Now they’re hanging on for dear life. They’re scrambling to keep their economies afloat and to stop them from unraveling under the weight of U.S. tariffs and retaliatory market chaos.

Thus we begin to see even more outlines emerging of the bigger play. It’s not just economic leverage. It’s strategic sequencing: destabilize, divide, deal. In his AF1 comments last night, Trump had harsh words for the meddlesome Europeans.

“Europe’s treated us very badly,” the President explained. So “we put a big tariff on Europe. They’re coming to the table; they want to talk.” But, he said, “there’s no talk unless they pay us a lot of money on a yearly basis, number one for present but also for past. Because they’ve taken a lot of our wealth away. And we’re not gonna allow that to happen.”

For Europe, therefore, it’s not just equalization— it’s retaliation. It’s reparations. I bet now they wish they hadn’t so enthusiastically leapt into the elections interference game back in 2020. They tried to sabotage his presidency. Now he’s dismantling their union— one tariff at a time.